Our theme for the month of June is “confessions.”
I usually have to apologize to people when they get in my car, unless they are twelve years old and begging me to play rap music, because I know my music taste is not great. My heavy listening playlist consists mostly of Japanese vocaloid music with the occasional anime opening and, inexplicably, “the river god” by leon chang for nearly four years. Somehow, I have only gotten worse with the new Sleep Token album Even in Arcadia.
Back in 2022, I watched a video that used Sleep Token’s cover of “Hey Ya.” Not dissimilarly to James Acaster, I was awed by the stripped version of a song I had only vaguely associated with He-Man gifs online (sorry to all the Outkast fans). Unlike James Acaster though, I didn’t have deep thoughts on two-beat measures and a renewed interest in Outkast. I instead went immediately to Sleep Token’s Spotify page.
These days, their artist profile is promoting their newest album and boasts of nine million monthly listeners, but when I stumbled across them, all that I could glean was that they wore masks and kept talking about worship.
The thing with Sleep Token is they have this whole thing. The lead singer is called Vessel; the main drummer called Vessel II or just II. They wear masks and black body paint and call their music an offering (to a deity called Sleep?). If you look in the comments or go on their subreddit, there are all these people ending their regular glazing with “worship.” It made me vaguely uncomfortable, but “The Love You Want” unlocked something so deep inside me that it somehow beat out the first wave of my vocaloid phase to claim the top spot on my 2022 Spotify Wrapped and still, along with “the river god,” tops my current rotation playlist.
I didn’t pay much attention to the lead up and release of their third full-length album, Take Me Back to Eden, adding songs as they came up on my radar. But suddenly, when I checked their Spotify page, the lead single “The Summoning” had millions of streams. It turns out this weird rock metal pop whatever band that I discovered by chance had somehow broken into moderate fame. This album, though, didn’t sell me. I added the closer, “Euclid,” to my playlist a year after I first heard it and called it a day. Sleep Token remained a band that I would say I enjoyed, even with all their weird stuff and even if other people didn’t. I was glad they were getting some attention.
This year, one of my youth group kids wore a Sleep Token shirt, and I was thrilled to make a new connection with them. I didn’t think about the band again until Anthony Fantano, my go-to YouTuber to watch over lunch, mentioned there was a new Sleep Token album in a throwaway line at the end of a video about André 3000’s piano EP, to which I said, “There’s a new Sleep Token album??”
Here’s the confession. Despite all their put-on mystique and pseudo-religiosity, despite the fact that Fantano again dislikes the album, despite Even in Arcadia hitting number one on the Billboard 200 and therefore crossing the line I have in the sand about popularity, I cannot stop listening to it.
I know it’s not real metal. I know it’s pop-y. I know the lyrics “I want to be your provider / Garner you with silk like a spider” are deeply cringe—sorry commenters, sometimes Vessel does sound like the emo kid who wrote poetry in high school. All the reaction videos I find on YouTube have click-bait-y titles and gasp so theatrically at lines that I just have to roll my eyes. The subreddit theorizing was getting dangerously close to sounding like how the teenagers talk in the leaks channel for my mobile game, reading into every single little detail of the promotional cycle. I could not care less about the “lore.” Even so, it is the only music (outside of aforementioned mobile game) that has gotten me to open up Spotify during work hours.
What this means practically, though, is that people in the unfortunate position of getting a ride from me get musical whiplash: going from seven minute songs that cycle through four different movements with lyrics boarding on pretentious to the soundtrack to the Project Sekai movie, which makes me beat on my steering wheel like I’m a drummer getting the audience to clap and sing along despite not knowing any Japanese. Also, I’m going to have a very strange Spotify Wrapped for 2025.
Title comes from Anthony Fantano’s review of Even in Arcadia: a burn so deep that I felt scorched, despite the fact that I would die before being identified as a Disney adult (no shade to a few of my fellow writers).
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.
